Electric bikes are booming, you can see them on the streets, see the new stores specializing in them, and you can see media outlets talking and writing about them. The Financial Times even produced this nice short video overview of the phenomenon, including a couple of factory visits, and traveling to two cities in Germany where e-bikes are making great inroads. After decades and decades of devastating car-centric city development, are e-bikes the next great technological transformation for cities?

There are a lot of grassroots and human-centred aspects to Fab Cities, but it’s also an intersection of fields where technology tends to play a large role. Even with better maintenance, re-use, repair, upcycling, and recycling, a lot of our electronics end up in the trash or supposedly recycled but actually shipped elsewhere to be disposed of in less than ideal situations.

The climate crisis will play out (is playing out) in various ways, two of them are more frequent and more extreme weather events, and another is temperatures rising unevenly. Some countries, and especially some cities, are already being hit hard.

Let’s start by “filing” this under a few ideas so that readers might better understand why this article on city administrations creating digital twins of their municipalities deserves their time. It’s kind of fascinating, it’s partially a new vision of smart cities, it’s quite aspirational so far (some might say it’s mostly hype), and it’s an intriguing topic where urbanism, architecture, challenges like the climate crisis, and gaming intersect.

Excellent research project on urban tech by the Jacobs Institute’s Urban Tech Hub at Cornell Tech, presented as an horizon scan plotting possibilities in the field of urban tech. Note that these are provocations, not predictions, in other words, ideas to consider, to be used in furthering discussions and reflexions.